Librarians must carve out new roles as advocates of more usable digital collections

Photo by Andy Snow

If the ebook tide has arrived, are academic libraries missing the boat? I don't mean to imply that we are unconcerned with or unaware of the demand for digital texts: our institutions scan, license, and promote them in ever-greater numbers. Despite these efforts, I have observed a disturbing trend. The typical user still does not connect libraries and ebooks. From the front lines of public service, awareness of digital library options remains dismally low. There is a commercial voice and an altruistic voice in the digital literacy narrative. The former is about innovation and ownership, while the latter focuses on advocacy and access. Rather than rising with the tide, the altruistic voice is often being drowned out. The problem is this: proprietary sites and ereaders are now so cemented in the public imagination that ebooks are becoming things that are bought and owned, not borrowed and shared. Digital texts abound, but they are discovered through commercial interfaces. This paradigm shift is significant, and I fear that we are not making our voices heard loudly enough to stem the tide.

Ebook personality disorder

In the foreseeable future few scholars or students will be able to rely exclusively on digital or printed books as their platform of choice, meaning that the research process is hybridizing. Within this context, academic library patrons encounter ebooks in a number of ways. Some have a conscious format or device preference, others are working with what is available, and more than we might expect are misinterpreting academic ebooks as indistinguishable from other types of sites. (And really, can you blame them?) Getting to the bottom of the issue is not difficult. There is a two-part problem: a lack of awareness, and usability challenges at micro and macro levels. It's going to take better education and quality-focused meta-collections with a more seamless user experience to bring patrons into the fold. Delivery platform aside, I find that most digital monographs suffer from the equivalent of a serious personality disorder (e.g., poor communication, lack of self-awareness, negative self-image, inaccessibility, inconsistency, and delusions of grandeur). They tend to be too disparate, DRM-protected, and reminiscent of e-journal content to be accessed or read gracefully, making them a hard sell. At my own institution, I observe patrons struggle to access and understand library-digitized and publisher provided ebooks in a research context. Their shared dissatisfaction is exposed by common questions: How can I tell this is an ebook? Why can't I print or read offline? How do I turn on the accessibility features? Why won't the link I copied last week work now? Can I get this on my Kindle? If you think about it, the mass-market ebook experience closely resembles its print-exclusive antecedent. Although they are far from perfect and prevent most forms of swapping and serendipity, apps and ereaders have neatly allowed individuals to create contiguous personal collections of purchased texts. A viable library equivalent remains elusive. Many public libraries have made downloading temporary titles relatively straightforward, but the access academic libraries provide through licensed and digitized content—web-based, site-specific, and largely non-downloadable—does not fit the mental image of a "digital library" that retailers and tech companies have helped users develop.

Crowdsourcing quality

For centuries, traditional libraries honed themselves into functional, self-sustaining units, offering reliable access to quality printed texts. By contrast, digital libraries are young, developing at a breakneck pace, and triaging their challenges as they progress. Research, it should be noted, does not consist of "light" (or Kindle-esque) reading. Rather, it is detail-oriented scrutiny of the obscure in a necessarily vast sea of choices. This early in the digital library transition, those who scrutinize ebooks with this level of detail will almost inevitably encounter issues. Which is not to say that these issues are or will remain unknown; behind the scenes of developing meta-collections such as the Internet Archive and HathiTrust, countless quality projects are underway. It may not be common knowledge, but these organizations are in general very interested to learn about potential improvements they can make to their collections, be they user interface suggestions or a simple report of a specific known issue. Bringing a problem to light does not ensure its resolution, but there are many individuals at digital libraries working to make them function more smoothly. Take an example from my own recent experience. While researching a trademark digitization project with a University of California, Berkeley I School faculty member, we discovered that almost 900 volumes of the US Patent and Trademark Office's Gazette of trademark and patent registries existed in HathiTrust, a partnership of 52 Google Books-affiliated institutions and other libraries that provides access to their scanned texts. When we then discovered that volumes were so riddled with visual and metadata errors as to be virtually unusable, we brought it to the attention of HathiTrust staff. To their immense credit, they rapidly investigated and addressed these issues, proposing rescanning and metadata correction and opening additional dia logue with librarians, researchers, and Google to discuss quality on a broader scale. HathiTrust's response to this challenge highlights the value-added ebook proposition offered by libraries: service orientation and craft-level production, the two things most difficult to replicate in the large-scale digitext economy. While the ostensibly "simple" commercial ebook voice may raise user expectations beyond what academic libraries currently provide, it need not thwart their satisfaction completely. Education and advocacy are essential to making our own voices heard over the ebook torrent. When we bring known issues to light and build bridges with content providers, we carve out roles as advocates of more usable collections. Librarians and researchers can crowd-source persistent ebook issues, request features, argue for accessibility, and shore up quality to the level that collections become research-worthy.

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Char Booth (charbooth@gmail.com, @charbooth), E-Learning Librarian at the University of California-Berkeley and a 2008 LJ Mover & Shaker, blogs at info-mational. She is also the author of Reflective Teaching, Effective Learning and Informing Innovation.